


The Eleventh Hour

by eponymous_rose



Category: Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Genre: 100-1000 Words, 1960s, Action/Adventure, Canon - TV, Gen, Humor, POV Third Person, Spies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 21:27:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eponymous_rose/pseuds/eponymous_rose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An ultimatum like so many others; the tipping point.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Eleventh Hour

Alexander Waverly was beginning to believe that his agents planned it this way deliberately - there was no other explanation for something that happened quite this often, anyway.

Solo glanced up, leaning forward, fingers tightening convulsively on the back of a chair. "Sir?"

With a start, he realised he'd been thinking aloud. "Never mind, Mr. Solo. How much time?" Even as he said it, he knew he no more needed to ask than Solo needed to check his watch: no amount of distraction could supersede the countdown thrumming in their ears.

"One minute and three seconds," said Solo, and his fingers loosened their death-grip on the chair as he slipped unconsciously into a more aggressive stance, his shadow looming across the table. "Sir, we still haven't heard from Illya. You could give the order to delay. He must be inside the base - if we just gave him a few more minutes to get out before detonating-"

"Mr. Solo-"

"-he might be at the door for all we know!"

"Mr. Solo, you forget yourself," Waverly snapped, and Solo, to his credit, quickly shifted his startled expression into a more simmering, subtle anger. "We have already jeopardised the mission by throwing ourselves headlong into this hunt for Mr. Kuryakin. I trust he's had sufficient time to make his escape-"

"If it was his for the making," Solo muttered. Waverly turned to glance at the clock - thirty-six seconds - and his hand brushed briefly against the communication controls as he passed.

He looked back in time to see Solo's look of relief flicker and fade as he realised there was no purpose behind the motion- "Sir, just one more minute. Please."

Waverly felt a pang somewhere rather near where his cardiologist was so fond of poking and prodding him these days, and stifled it just as quickly - sentimentality in a case like this could kill more than just a wayward agent. "Mr. Solo-" he said.

Solo rounded the table with surprising speed, and for an instant Waverly caught a glimpse of the man Thrush agents must see, the elaborate, suave playboy subsumed into cold accusation: the man who made history in Survival School, the youngest C.E.A. on record, the one who returned unscathed from missions that were reckless, bordering on the insane, with a self-effacing smile. Solo's Luck, they called it, but here was a man who made his own fortune.

He stopped short of Waverly, a few paces, no more. "You've done it before," he said, but the even the pleading expression had faded, replaced by a cold disinterest; Waverly's men were trained to anticipate the future, to prepare themselves in advance, to stay a few steps ahead. The eight seconds remaining on the clock may as well have been zero. "You let me go after him-"

"And don't think I'm not grateful," gasped a new voice over the open line, "but would you mind not cutting it so close next time?"

Anything Solo said then was drowned out by the sound of a distant explosion over the line; Waverly automatically reached over and disabled the internal alarms activated by such excessive noise, and he knew Solo noticed the way his hands were shaking.

And then the sound had ended, reverberating, and Solo was reaching across Waverly for the microphone, insolent in relief where he'd been restrained in anger. "Illya?"

A silence on the line, stretching and twisting, and then a cough and a familiar voice, petulant and utterly miserable. "I think there's soot in my hair."

"He's complaining; he's all right," Solo said, and his grin faded as he met Waverly's eyes. "Er," he said, and handed back the microphone, flushing slightly. "Sorry, sir."

Waverly felt the corner of his mouth twitch into a smile, but this was familiar, an act, a routine as straightforward as any situation the agents roleplayed in training. This time, though, Solo wouldn't meet his gaze for long, and after a pickup was established for Kuryakin, he disappeared to his own office to draw up the paperwork for the Barkley affair, concluded a good three weeks previous. Since rumours had started circulating that Waverly was eyeing him as a successor, he'd taken a perfunctory interest in his administrative duties, but old habits died hard, and Solo was nearly as proficient at procrastinating as he was at anything else.

Old habits. Solo's Luck. Waverly sank into his chair, watching as the clock on the wall ticked steadily up from zero, towards some new calamity, some new ultimatum. Back at the start, when he'd been the one crawling through tunnels and planting explosives, he'd been occasionally overcome by the missing moments, by the times something had so nearly happened that it was nearly tangible, nearly real.

As he stepped into the street that night, he turned to a young man passing by and said: "The world nearly ended today, you know."

"Tell me about it, man," said the boy with a sigh. "Don't it always?"

And as the shadows closed around the city, Waverly could hear the footsteps echoing behind him that weren't his own, and smiled.

"Don't it always," he said.


End file.
